Digg has a writeup of how Gamespot has been progressively leaking private email addresses to random spammers. Gamespot has been completely non-responsive when contacted.
Based on the comments I’m seeing, it looks like old users are left alone, and new users are being harvested / sold.
I wrote about this last month and the problem remains. I should add that I’ve never used the forums. All I did was create an account so I could download a file.
So far the terrain has been colored using a half-baked scheme I cooked up at the beginning. This system was intended to be temporary, until I can use proper texture mapping.
If you recall, here is how things look now:
Mark has a post on “Unintended Customers”, where he talks about companies offering a product or service and then being shocked when someone wants to use the thing in a way the company didn’t anticipate.
“Randy Waterhouse works for the company that’s attempting to set up a data haven, and he finds that the most of his customers want to use the data haven to store money. Pretty straightforward, right? Well, most of the people who want to store their money their are criminals of the worst sort. I guess in that particular case, there is reason to freak out at these unexpected customers, but I thought the reference was interesting because while there may be lots of legitimate uses for a data haven, the criminal element would almost certainly be attracted to a way to store their drug money (or whatever) with impugnity (that and probably spam, pornography, and gambling). Like all advances in technology, the data haven could be used for good or for ill… “
This reminds me of a controvery on Slashdot a while ago. People were concerned that open-source software (Linux, in particular) was being used by terrorists, and were debating about how they might stop it from happening. This was a bit like inventing a hammer, and then finding out people were using the hammer to build gallows on which heretics were hung. Many inventors, when confronted with this, attempt to make their hammer unable to build gallows and yet still be as useful as the original hammer. I can’t recall an instance where this has worked, but it’s understandable that they try. Nobody wants to see their work benefitting their enemies.
Which brings me to the bizzare Google controversy of last week, which seems to be some sort of inversion of this problem. Google is already the most popular search engine by far, so they don’t need to go out of their way to attract “better” customers. And yet, they were working to accomodate Chineese censors. This would be like Avi and Randy sitting atop a successful data haven and saying, “Sure we have lots of regular customers, but criminals refuse to do business with us unless we make some changes. So let’s do it!” The great thing about being big and successful is that you no longer need to worry about pleasing unsavory customers, because you have plenty of regular ones. (Okay, we are talking about everyone in China, which is an awful lot of “customers”.)
Lots of people pointed out that Google is a public company, and can’t sacrifice profits for ideals, even if the ideals are popular, resonable ones like the freedom for people to communicate. This is true enough, but I think Google has made a disasterous business decision as well.
Setting aside the free speech issues, the real danger for both Google and the hypothetical data haven is that once you prove you are both willing and able to bend your system to someone’s will, a lot of people are going to begin exerting power against you to make you bend it their way. Some people have already pointed out that Google is now willing to censor political dissent (in China), but not child porn (in the US). If a court suddnly demands that Google start blocking child porn, they can no longer claim it isn’t feasible from a technical standpoint, and they can’t refuse without looking like they support child porn. Keeping this in mind, there is no end to the types of information people would like to block, limit, or control. What about detailed plans for building bombs from common items? What about methods of tax evasion? Hate speech? Regular porn? Gambling? Swastikas in Germany? Swimsuit pictures in Egypt? Danish political cartoons?
Google may soon find itself being dragged into courts around the world, forced to filter all sorts of things for different powers, and being held accountable for things they “should” have filtered but didn’t. This could get very messy for them. If this happens, they will need to do lots of unprofitable coding to meet these demands. Going back to the hammer analogy, they are going to be bullied into making all sorts of special hammers that can and cannot do various taks, just to keep the customers they have now. In the end, their search engine may be less useful because people will trust in the results less. (For example, a support website aimed at victims of child porn may be tagged as actual child porn, and indeed this post might be labeled as such because I’m using the term so often.)
Google should fear the day when people see something offsensive in the search results, and instead of thinking, “Why does that website exist?” they think, “Why did Google index that site?” If people percieve them as being responsible for the contents of the internet, there is no end of the trouble they will have.
If you’ve never read one of these before, then you may want to read the Rules of Dream Cast before proceeding.
I remember that at the time there was a lot of hand-wringing about how the A-Team was a new low in the rise of television violence. (A low in the rise? Who am I kidding? Can we just pretend that makes sense and move along?) The show seems tame by today’s standards, and perhaps even comical. Every show had at least one firefight. I don’t remember people getting shot and bleeding. I don’t even recall bullet holes appearing in stuff they used for cover. I don’t know how two teams of professional mercenaries could have a battle with automatic weapons at twenty yards and not have any injuries, except for the fact that the standards of the day did not allow for bullet-riddled corpses on network television.
Someday Hollywood will, much like Dr. Frankenstein, dig up this old show and attempt to bring it to life again in the name of science. Well, science and money. Maybe just money. Anyway, who would be in it? Let’s see…
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Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith
Tommy Lee Jones is perfect for the role of the hardass cigar-chewing leader. He’s been playing similar characters at least since The Fugitive. I can already hear him barking the Hannibal catchphrase, “I love it when a plan comes together”. |
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Captain “Howlin’ Mad” Murdock
Not only does Jim Carrey look the part, but he specializes in playing crazy, nutty characters. There is no reason to even consider anyone else for the part. |
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Lieutenant Templeton “Face” Peck
Face’s skill was “with the ladies”, although thinking back I don’t recall how that ever translated into a meaningful contribution to the team. He was usually scarce when the shooting started. I’m sure his angle was as a con man of sorts. Sounds like a job for Owen Wilson. |
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Sergeant Bosco “B.A.” Baracus
Mr. T didn’t really play any particular part. He just came on and played himself, which was charming enough to give him a popular appeal that reached far beyond the show itself. From the mohawk, to the 40lbs of gold chains, to the colorful clothing, to the various catchphrases he used, he was a wholly unique character. His style became a one-man culture, seemingly detached from the world around him. Nobody else looked like that and acted like that. So the question is, do you hire an actor to play the character as Mr. T. did, or do you let them establish their own take on B.A. Baracus? If you go with the former, then you are, in essence, hiring someone to play Mr. T. This would be tricky to pull off without turning it into parody. Plus, no matter how well they played the part, nobody is going to play Mr. T as well as Mr. T did. On the other hand, if you let an actor establish their own version of B.A., then it will alienate many fans. This is a difficult call. I have no suggestions for who might play B.A. as Mr. T. did, but if you are going to let another actor come in and make the role their own, then I suggest: Keep a couple of gold chains, throw in one or two instances of his catchphrases as homage, and give the role to Ice Cube . |
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Amy Allen / Tawnia Baker
The role of The Reporter was played by a couple of different actresses during the run of the show. I think it is pretty obvious that this character is here because the laws of television writing proclaim that You Need A Girl in your show. The fact that they switched actresses demonstrated that it didn’t really matter who played the part, as long as she was easy on the eyes. Knight Rider did the same thing. There isn’t much to this character, which means there isn’t much for us to work with. So, I don’t know. Just get someone pretty that can read their lines without stuttering and won’t trip over the scenery. Hire a random Hooters girl. It doesn’t matter. |
Yesterday I talked about skill in first-person shooters. Mark and Jay Barnson both weighed in with comments that got me really thinking about deathmatch for the first time in a few years. I want to expand on some of the ideas I talked about before. I’m going to relate a true story, and at first all of this is going to seem like a lot of bragging. If you can endure the anecdote, I’ll have some humble pie before the end. Deal?
Way back in ye olden times of 1997 or so, I was playing a 1-on-1 Quake deathmatch against a friend. This was a LAN game, and we were just a few feet away from each other. We both knew I was the stronger player, but I went easy on him. Still, the game was still frustrating for him. At one point, an hour or so into the game, something odd happened. I came into a room, and knew he was coming, even though I couldn’t see him yet. I fired a rocket. He rounded the corner just in time to get hit in the face with it. Here is what the scene looked like:
So he ran through a door, crossed a room, and suddenly collided with a rocket that was already on its way to intercept him. I fired the rocket well before he came into view. How did I do that? If we were strangers playing online he would have probably accused me of cheating, but we were friends and he could, if he wanted, glance over at my screen and see I was not using any sort of cheat. He was frustrated, but assumed it was some sort of fluke.
Then I did it again.
Here is the corner where I would see my friend explode.Now he was annoyed and wanted to know how I was doing this. I wasn’t even sure. I’d just had a gut reaction, and I couldn’t explain why I’d shot the rocket at that precise moment.
It happened a third time. My friend was angry by this point, and was determined to figure out what was going on. It was too easy to replicate for it to be luck, and neither of us was willing to believe I’d developed ESP.
Again, he came through the door, but this time he stopped short of the corner and my rocket sailed by in front of him. Then we both realized that it was the sound of him opening the door that had tipped me off. When he opened the door, I was aware he was coming and fired in anticipation of him coming around the corner.
This isn’t as hard as it sounds. In games like this, everyone runs at the same fixed speed. Doors open as you get near them, so you can run through without breaking stride. Players tend to travel in a direct line to wherever they are headed. So, it was a fixed interval of time from the time I heard the clunk of the door opening to the moment he came into view. After playing for an hour on the same dang level, I’d become accustomed to this interval and was reacting to it like Pavlov’s dog. Door sound? Shoot! To an unfamiliar player, this just seems like magic.
This story teaches us three things:
In my mind, I divide players into five categories:
“What’s that?”, they ask.
“That’s a healthpack.”
(pause)
“Do I need it?”
“Sure.”
This is someone who has leaned how to move. They can run, jump, dodge, hit moving targets, duck, circle strafe, and otherwise navigate fluidly. They probably think of themselves as accomplished players, and are outraged by all the “cheaters” they meet online. In the earlier story, this was about where my friend was.
They can’t understand how other people can be so impossible to kill. After all, aren’t they are just running and jumping the same as everyone else? They can’t run faster or jump higher or have more health than anyone else. Those guys must be cheating!
This is someone who uses audio clues, as in my story, to know where the enemy is. They notice things less experienced players don’t. They can run into a room, observe that two of three health items are missing and the elevator is down. They will then extrapolate where the enemy is (they didn’t take the elevator, they didn’t use the door I just came through, they didn’t use the big door because I didn’t hear it, so they must have run down this side hallway) how much health they have (they didn’t get the last of the three health items, so they must be at full health now) and where they are headed.
The experienced player will be waiting when the other guy gets to wherever he’s going, and the other guy will never see it coming. To the other guy, it seems like magic.
One more example: I’ll run into a room and see someone die in a fight. Even if the killer is out of view, I know he’s there and (if he’s a normal player) that he’s going to want to run in and grab the weapon dropped by the guy he just killed. Single-player games have sort of trained us to grab stuff off the ground like this even if we don’t really need it. It’s a very dangerous habit to have, since it makes people very predictable. I can launch a rocket at the dead or dying player and keep moving. Odds are their killer will rush in just in time to ride the rocket. Again, to this guy it seems like magic. We never even saw each other and I pegged him with a rocket.
It’s hard for me to fully understand what makes these guys so good, because I’m not this good myself. I know better than to accuse these guys of cheating, but it feels like cheating when they beat me.
Items re-appear at regular intervals. Sixty seconds after you pick up an item, a replacement appears. Expert players manage to show up at exactly the right moment to get the respawning item. The item will literally materialize just as they pass over it’s spot. Thus, I never get the chance to pick it up. They have the ability to control an entire level like this, hoarding all of the good items and never letting anyone get a shot at them. The only way to get a good item is to engage the expert on his own terms, and prevail.
Or, they will deliberately skip grabbing easy nearby items that everyone else reflexivly grabs. This throws off the thinking of people like myself. I assume if the items are there, nobody has passed through here in the last minute. Usually this is true, but against Expert players this is a dangerous assumption.
These guys seem to know which way I’m going to dodge. They fire one rocket, then another. I leap out of the path of the first and end up taking the second one right on the nose. How did he know I was going to dodge that way?
Actually, let me hazard a guess: In a fight, getting close to walls is bad because rockets hit walls and the splash damage will turn a near miss into a kill. So, people like me tend to dodge into the open. People dodge perpendicular to the path of the rocket. Movement speed is the same for everyone. Taking all of this into account, my enemy knows – in the same way I knew my friend was coming around the corner – where I will be in a second or two even before I’ve decided myself. Stuff that I do that seems random is actually the same thing that lots of others do in the given situation.
These players are difficult to hit and almost impossible to kill for people at my level.
There aren’t many players like this in the world. The most famous example today is Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel. I can’t really explain what makes these guys so good, since I’ve never been good enough to play against them. Even if I did, I doubt I’d live long enough to make any worthwhile observations. Still, anecdotal evidence suggests that there is at least as big a gap between “Expert” and “Professional” as there is between “Experienced” and “Expert”. There may be even more.
And now to the point: I suggest that there is at least an order of magnitude of skill between each of these levels. That is, in a game to ten points, a casual player will not get more than one point on an experienced one. I can say with certainty that experienced players like me don’t do better than 1-in-10 against experts. If you follow this to the logical conclusion, it suggests that the best player is at least 10,000 times better than a newbie. That is a game with a lot of depth!
I played Unreal Tournament for years. For a while I played every day. There used to be an automated ranking system that tracked every single online match and rated players accordingly. The site has moved since I last checked it in 2001, but here is someone’s local server stats that gives a peek at what the worldwide ranking used to look like. At the time, I worked myself into the top 5% of all players online, but an honest assessment of my skills shows that I never really reached “Expert”. This means I could do well against 19 out of 20 people I met, but of those 4% of the people I couldn’t beat, most were so good I couldn’t even score against them. They were so much better than me that they seemed unkillable. I could have them cornered and outgunned (an acomplishment in and of itself, or a very lucky break) and I would still lose.
There may even be another level between Expert and Professional – It’s not like I can tell the difference between someone 10 times better than me and someone 100 times better than me. Once I’m that far outclassed, the whole thing is a red blur of death and tears until I give up and log off in shame.
As I mentioned yesterday, it takes an amazing level of patience for a newbie to join the game at this point, and to stick to the game long enough to the point where they can actually get on the scoreboard.
Even worse: The problem feeds on itself. As Jay pointed out, accomplished players get bored with the standard game after a while and designers try to keep things fresh by introducing new mechanics and gameplay elements. The latest Unreal Tournament has five or six different vehicles, some of which have multiple positions players can take. (For example, driver, machine gunner, side gunner, etc) So, once you’re bored with standard combat you can then start learning about all of the different positions and maybe attempt to specialize in piloting one of them.
The world of deathmatch is getting bigger. Is the audience?
Work continues on the terrain engine. Part one is available here.
Now comes a moment where I have to make a major choice that will affect many decisions down the road. I want to add shadows, so that the hills can cast shadows on one another. Shadows are very striking and add a great deal of realisim, but they come at a significant price.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Terrain, Part 6”
From Gamespot comes this article, where Peter Moore, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s interactive entertainment business, says the following:
“Let’s be fair. Whether it’s five, 10, 15, 20 years from now, the concept of driving to the store to buy a plastic disc with data on it and driving back and popping it in the drive will be ridiculous. We’ll tell our grandchildren that and they’ll laugh at us.”
Larry Ellison of Oracle fame, made the same argument about ten years ago.
“I hate the PC with a passion. Me going down to the store and buying Windows 95, I’ve got to get into my car drive down to a store buy a cardboard box full of bits you know encoded on a piece of plastic CDROM and you bring it home and read a manual install this thing – you must be kidding you know, put the stuff on the net – it’s bits, don’t put bits in cardboard, cardboard in trucks, trucks to stores, me go to the store, you know, pick the stuff out, it’s insane. OK I love the Internet – I want information you know it flows across the wire.”
I predict that in ten years people will still be predicting this box-free future, and it won’t be any closer. Universal digital delivery – which is what you need if you want to get rid of the boxes in stores – won’t happen until some new uber-DRM scheme comes along to thwart piracy, which doesn’t seem likely. (Note: When I say you need DRM, I mean publishers will insist on strong DRM. Obviously consumers would rather do without it.) But if it did, you’d still need a way to get content to laptops and other machines without universal high-speed access. But even when these issues are overcome, the process of buying some sort of physical media is NEVER going to go away.
When people pay money for something, they like to be able to hold the thing and say “I own this”. The same is true of music. People want the jewel case with the nice artwork and a shiney disc. How often have you been in the store and seen people just browsing the shelf, reading the boxes and looking for something new? There is something going on here that is more than just buying data. Something that won’t happen if you don’t have boxes in stores. Even if discs went away, and all content came over the net, you STILL wouldn’t be rid of boxes in stores, because those boxes turn into impulse purchases. People would still be able to impulse-buy at the store and take the box home, where they would then download their new thing.
Moore may be right about one thing, though. Our grandkids may well laugh at us. They will see predictions like the one in his article and laugh in the same way we laugh at the jetpacks-and-flying-cars future of the past.
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
What does it mean when a program crashes, and why does it happen?
Imagine if the original Star Wars hadn't appeared in the 1970's, but instead was pitched to studios in 2006. How would that turn out?
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
T w e n t y S i d e d
